Outage outrage: O2 dishes out 3 free days, £10 voucher

Following last week's O2 mobile network outage, the telco is giving contract customers three days of free connectivity in compensation. Pre-paid users will get an additional topup, and everyone gets £10 to spend in the O2 store.

Of the operator's three million customers, only those who suffered connection difficulties will get 10 per cent knocked off their monthly bill, or 10 per cent added to their first topup in September, but every O2 customer will get a £10 voucher to be redeemed at an O2 store.

"The issue we had was unprecedented and we recognise that this caused inconvenience and frustration for those who had a disruption in service," says the company, in no way blaming Ericsson to whom the running of the core network had been outsourced.

Over the next week, O2 will be contacting every customer, via text message, to say sorry and inform them how to get their £10 voucher.

Mostly that will involve signing up to the O2 Priority Moments scheme, which already hands out vouchers for various stores and services, so even if it costs the network a fair bit at least they'll get some more people signed up to their Groupon equivalent.

Customers of O2-owned network Giffgaff, which was also rocked by the outage, will also get 10 per cent additional credit on every topup applied over the next week, but no £10 voucher for them.

Tesco Mobile, half owned by O2 and also hit by the problems, hasn't said what it will be offering customers, not yet at least.

Compensation is a tough thing to do – it won't be enough to satisfy customers who had come to rely on their mobile connectivity, but O2 had no legal obligation to offer anything at all (all operators run on "best effort"). ®